


Celestial Flowers

by Petronia



Category: Honou no Mirage (Mirage of Blaze) (anime)
Genre: Angst, Buddhism, Canon - Book, Community: 31_days, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2005-08-01
Updated: 2005-07-31
Packaged: 2017-10-05 18:25:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 7,226
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/44707
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Petronia/pseuds/Petronia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A series of short pieces focussing on various characters, from Sengoku Era to circa book 13.  Based on the August 2005 prompt list for the <a href="http://community.livejournal.com/31_days">31 Days</a> LJ community.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Be indomitable, o my heart

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Naoe and Takaya, between books 9-10.

Four centuries ago it was easier. The choice was clear at least: die by one's own blade, or like a dog at the hand of another. One clean cut to end it all.

With the passing years rot has set in.

By now it has invaded every fiber. Man is capable of unimaginable acts when driven to extremity: by hunger and thirst, by physical pain, by a threat to a loved one, by loss, by need, by fear. When I placed the sword against my throat I thought I understood what these things were. I was wrong. I didn't know one could be driven beyond death, to a place emptier and unsightlier still. I didn't know to what lengths I would go. I never truly saw myself before he saw me.

I never asked him to. I never asked for it. I didn't.

Without him I—

***

  
The white light swallows everything, and falls away like sand.

Gradually sight returns: patterns of paleness and shadow resolve themselves into broken paving, the dark masses of uprooted trees. Here and there the silhouettes of collapsed torii emerge as ruined sharp angles against the night sky. The temple grounds are utterly silent, as after the passing of a storm.

Somewhere in the distance, a siren begins to wail.

Takaya stands, head bowed, in the midst of prone forms that were occupied once by lords and warriors. His shoulders lift and fall with every shuddering breath. He holds himself as if it hurts him to stand, as if the cost doesn't matter.

Eventually he straightens. His face is very pale; his eyes burn. Wordlessly he moves toward the gate.

Naoe catches him as his knees buckle. It throws him off balance, and he sinks to one knee in Takaya's stead, the other a dead weight against his shoulder and chest. The waist around which his arm wraps is painfully slender.

For a split second he feels Takaya relax against him, fingers clutching at the fabric of his suit lapel. Then his grip tightens, and he pushes away.

"Don't touch me," he says.


	2. A school of morality

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kagetora and Kenshin, 1572.

He found Kenshin in the courtyard, in the shadow of the stables: a white stocky form moving under the beasts' trustful gaze. He was adjusting the harness on his favorite bay, which was saddled to ride. Several retainers accompanied him, leading their own mounts by the bridle.

Kagetora came to a halt a few paces away. Dread burdened his belly with lead; it seemed to him suddenly that he could approach no further. After a moment he sank to one knee in the scattered hay and dust.

"My lord," someone said, and stopped short. There was a murmured command. Kagetora kept his eyes on the ground in front of him. At length Kenshin's boots – already caked with mud despite the hour – entered his field of vision, and the white-grey hem of his cloak. There they marked a pause.

The weight of a hand on his hair came as a surprise. Involuntarily he lifted his face. Kenshin gazed down at him, his expression grave.

"Ride with me," he said.

***

  
Clouds scudded across the sky, pale with October. The wind blew sharp and bracing in their faces.

Near the water's edge Kenshin wheeled his mount, the bay pawing and cantering in a tight circle over the shingle. Kagetora spurred his horse down the bank to join him. Slate pebbles clattered under the animals' hooves in sharp reports.

The sea north of Echigo was wild and grey. No smooth and shining beach of sand this; the littoral was formed of sharp cliffs and jutting boulders, islands that stood offshore like rock turrets, barren but for tufts of grass, battered by waves in great sprays of white foam. Yet it had a desolate beauty that caught at the heart and would not let go.

"The land does not exist for its lord and master," said Kenshin. "It awaits only the one befitting it."

He had eyes that were dark brown and rheumy, often narrowed against the sun. At moments they were capable of unparalleled sharpness. This was the gaze he turned on Kagetora. It was as if Kenshin saw, not Kagetora as he stood before him, but someone of far greater inherent worth; someone deserving. He could barely breathe. Wildly he thought, _I will make it truth, Father, as long as you allow me._

"I do not intend to return you to Sagami," Kenshin said. "Your brother may renege on the oath made by his father, but I will not renege on mine." Then his eyes softened, and he said, "I do not know if you wish to return to your blood kin. I would not deny them to you. But my choice stands, so long as you are willing to call me Father. For I have need of you."

At first he did not understand the words. Then they were lost beneath the pounding of his heart. He dismounted, taking Kenshin's gloved hand and pressing it to his lips.

"I would follow you until the ends of the earth, my lord," he said. "To my death, gladly, and beyond."

Kenshin smiled, and clasped his hand.

"I would not have it so," he said. "You must live."


	3. Like Hamlet

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Naoe, between books 9-10. References the events of the Chiaki-centric short story in _Shinku no hata wo hirugaese._

There was no thesis to be had from the passion that ruled him. It sprang dark and only headier from vivisection; all his logic exhausted itself in sophistry. In despair he constructed ontologies of hatred, perversely savouring the complexity of his own impulses as if they were fine wine. For instance: _on such and such a day in August you said to me, "It does not matter what else you understand, as long as you understand that you can change nothing."_ Or: _concerning the containment of the Soukoku rebels you would not brook discussion, though our course of action is certain to increase the territorial holdings of the Oda in the long term. I cannot believe you in the right, yet I cannot prove you wrong._ Or again: _the certainty in your eyes like a white, unwavering flame._

Again: _the night was chilly and windless. Nagahide had disappeared off somewhere, and it took hours to erase our traces from the scene of the battle. They shut down the subway lines around Shiba Park altogether. By the time we arrived back at the hotel you were so exhausted you slumped down on your bed and fell asleep, pausing only to kick off your shoes. You must have forgotten to be wary of me, or you would not have allowed yourself. I know you forget sometimes. I helped you out of your jacket; you barely stirred. The leather was warm and smelt of your skin at the collar. Your hair was in your face, dark and heavy and a bit damp, like the mane of a wild beast. I brushed it back but didn't touch you. I was afraid of what would happen if I touched you. I couldn't take my eyes off you._


	4. She left her life on Monday

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ayako, pre-book 10.

When he comes downstairs she's already in the vestibule, motorbike helmet tucked under her left arm, zipping up her boot while standing on the other leg. The pose abruptly reminds him of when she was in junior high, and competed in track meets. For a brief time she was the fastest girl in the school district.

She lifts her head and smiles, sensing his gaze. After a moment she remembers to remove the triangle of buttered toast from between her teeth.

_I'm going, Father.  
_

_Have a good day,_ he says. _Take care._

It is not merely that his courage fails him. She wouldn't answer him if he asked, and he doesn't want to make her tell the lies Sachiko believes. It was not they who went wrong, and neither has she. He knows it in his soul. There is nothing complicated or fettered about her, and it breaks his heart again and again to realise that she has never changed.

Even when she was born her eyes were calm and clear, like those of a lioness.

After the sound of the motorbike has receded into the distance, he pads into the kitchen and pours himself a cup of coffee.


	5. A boy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Naoe, 1980.

She is not very old, by the tallying of years. But there are only two kinds of women: those who are young, and those who have lived forever.

Afterward he sprawls on the upholstered armchair near the window, watching her dress. They never bothered to close the drapes. The lowering sun filters, hazy and indolent, through the inner curtains of gauze. His school blazer is still where he left it, folded neatly over the back of the chair; the tie has slipped to the carpet. His feet are bare. This, too, is a forbidden game.

His gaze conveys an older man's appreciation, not wonder. It troubles her. She arches her back as she rolls her stockings back up over her thighs, meeting his eyes sidelong.

_Aren't you going to shower?_ she says.

_In a moment,_ he says. He reaches into the side pocket of the blazer and fishes out a pack of cigarettes. _Pass me a light?___

_Such a terrible boy,_ she says, and means it.

She stands in front of him and flicks the lighter. As he leans forward she's startled into a gesture of prudishness, crossing her arm over her chest to adjust her bra strap. But his eyes are sliding past even as he inhales. She's seen him do it before, in the car, as they were stopped at an intersection. Before the light shifted to green they were boxed in on three sides by a stream of pressing, uniform humanity. At the time she noticed the geometric curve of his eyelashes, a few shades darker than his hair.

_What are you looking for?_

_The other end of a thread,_ he answers.


	6. To the lords and ladies of Byzantium

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Irobe as Sasaki-sensei, circulatory disease expert, 1955.

Her name was Noriko. Twelve years old, knobby elbows and knees in a school uniform a size too loose for her form, her heart shaped face framed by tight braids. She sat, obedient, before Irobe's desk. Her hands were clasped primly in her lap, but the surreptitious manner in which she tapped her shoes against the legs of the chair spoke of impatience with the proceedings. The yellow plastic beads in her hair elastics clattered when she shook her head.

"Am I all right, Sensei?"

"You'll be just fine," he told her. "Call your father in, young miss, I have to speak with him."

She dashed to comply. He saw her smile as she slipped through the door.

When the father was seated he told him the news, as gently as he knew how. At first the man only stared at him. Irobe thought he had not understood, but when he began to repeat himself the man shook his head.

"Is there – is there anything that can be done? To cure her?"

"There are treatments," he said. "But at this time medical science—"

The words left a grey aftertaste.

"Her mother died," the man said. He made a distracted, abortive gesture, as if groping for something in front of his chest, before letting his hand drop back into his lap again. "In the bombing. Both our families. Noriko is all I have left."

"I'm deeply sorry," Irobe said. "We will do all we can, of course."

He described the course of palliative treatment. The father listened docilely. With every moment that passed his unmoving form seemed to collapse further inward on itself.

At the door he turned, brittle calm giving way, and sank to his knees in front of Irobe.

"Please, Sensei," he said. " An operation – anything, anything you can think of – money is no object. I will do something. She's suffered so much already. If we have to go to Europe – America –"

He hurried to help the man up. He was trembling and for a long time would not get to his feet.

***

After they left he spent some minutes gazing out the window.

Eventually he saw the two emerge from the building. Even from afar the daughter moved in the manner of an ordinary, happy child, skipping here and there for a little distance before dashing back to take her father's hand. Her face was lifted toward him, but the man strode directly toward the gate, shoulders squared and eyes straight ahead. They passed under a row of trees, and were hidden from view.

The trees were still young. There was no trace of the old ones that had stood in their place, little more than a decade ago. To see the city now one would never have guessed at the devastation; even the scars left on the populace were mostly invisible.

Only the ghosts slumbering under the earth had seen their ranks swell.

It had been thus as well after the Meireki fires, early in Ieyasu's reign. He had not been in Edo then (there had not been the endless night operating in the stench of burnt flesh and the groans of the triage line, until the table ran with blood and exhaustion numbed even the faculty of horror - and the dread of uncertainty until Naoe had stumbled into the field hospital an hour after dawn, face pale and drawn under the soot, supporting Kagetora in his arms), but in the ensuing weeks he had witnessed the extent of the destruction. Nothing had been spared: neither temples nor bridges, hovels nor great noble houses. It had seemed no human settlement could ever again occupy the smouldering shell that had once been a mighty city. Yet Edo had risen again, its streets built wider and more splendid than before over the spirits of the bound, teeming dead.

After all there was little wisdom to be gained in age. Only this knowledge: all wars end. By its nature fire burns to extinction. A decade ago the young strove once again for a glorious death in battle, knowing no other option, but Irobe's first war had been long ago. He knew that as there was a life before madness and conquest, so there would be a life afterward. An ordinary life.

All wars end.

It was a mantra he repeated often to himself, these days.

In the other room the telephone rang. A few seconds later his secretary peered around the door.

"It's Kazahara-san, Sensei," she said. "He's calling long-distance."

She had heard or guessed enough over the years to look concerned. He crossed the floor and took the receiver from her.

"We've discovered the instigator of the incidents in Kyuushuu."

The terrible exhaustion in Naoe's voice preceded the sense of his words.

Irobe closed his eyes briefly.

"I'll come down by train tomorrow morning," he said.


	7. Twiggy vs. James Bond

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nobunaga and Ranmaru, pre-book 10.
> 
> Music: [Pizzicato Five, "Catchy (Towa Tei Voltage Unlimited Mix)"](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiWv40w4vr4)

Nobunaga went through "periods". He approached everything with the same boundless energy. To terrorized lesser minions ("casual acquaintances" being hardly descriptive) it seemed he would order mass executions and scorched-earth military campaigns at the drop of a 100-yen coin, on sheer psychopathic whim, which of course wasn't true. It was just difficult to tell when he did his thinking.

If he laughed you were all right. As a general rule.

It all depended on whether you were with him or against him.

Stupid people did exist.

The first month Ranmaru made a large number of orders from mail catalogues. He also racked up an impressive room service and telephone bill. Nobunaga wanted to know what he had missed but didn't want to go outside to learn. Cable television did the trick, and faster. It occurred to Ranmaru that an image of (post)modern Japan thus constructed might suffer somewhat from media hyperbole, but Nobunaga had always had an affinity for theatre.

When he found out the Uesugi Yashashuu had robbed him of the 1960s he was livid.

"It was more interesting in England, m'lord," Ranmaru said. "Or in America. Here there was nothing but tiresome riots and people playing acoustic guitar."

"I would have made it interesting," Nobunaga said.

This was unarguable.

There was a record playing. (There was a record player. There was a CD player and a laserdisc player and cassette radios of both the portable and non-portable variety. The record player was lime-coloured plastic with silver trim and rounded corners.) It sounded like some sort of bebop or jazz, with frenetic drums and retro strings and a disturbingly chipper female warbling in the treble range. Ranmaru couldn't imagine Nobunaga putting on anything of the sort except as background music for bloody murder, and felt relieved when the needle moved to the next track and revealed it to be a disjointed pastiche of found noise and heavy metal guitars. He set the twelve-pack of Coca-Cola down on the floor, picked his way around the discarded piles of clothing (wasn't that the sequined mesh top m'lord had lost last week?) and peeked around the bathroom door hesitantly.

"M'lord...?"

At first he thought there had been murder after all. The marble-tiled floor was streaked with crimson, and the bathtub looked as if someone had hung a pig to bleed from the shower head. Then he saw Nobunaga's hair, which was wet and dripping pink liquid down his back, irrevocably staining his rhinestone-studded denim vest – not that it mattered. He blinked twice, and smiled.

"Well, O-Ran? What think you?"

"It's lovely, m'lord," he said. "But you should allow me, it's my duty and pleasure to care for m'lord's person."

Half a dozen ruined towels later he sat cross-legged on the carpet, barefoot and tie undone, Nobunaga's head in his lap. The colour had turned out beautifully, a red like autumnal leaves or painted scrolls depicting the eight fiery hells.

"Now this befits the Demon King of the Six Realms," said Nobunaga. He reached up and pulled Ranmaru's beret off his head, ruffling his hair. "I like this time, O-Ran. It suits me."

"It is yours for the taking, m'lord. All of it—"

Nobunaga rolled over onto his back, pulling Ranmaru with him. A casual jerk sent Ranmaru's buttons flying. His shirt slid down, baring his shoulders. Ranmaru bit his lip, arched his back languidly. He had missed this; had not let himself think of it all this time, lest he be overcome with longing. After all he could only aspire to please, not choose. He leant forward until his lips brushed his lord's ear, and whispered to him of the preparations he'd made. Great forces had been amassed in his name, awaiting only a word: a single command from his lips.

"Tell me about _him,_ then," Nobunaga said. His hands moved deftly over Ranmaru's skin, trailing shivers in their wake. "What is he like now?"

"Saa..." It was not the first time Nobunaga had asked. He liked to hear about it. Ranmaru lowered his lashes dreamily, remembering.

"A rough little boy," he said finally. "All wildness and bluster. Untrained, unthinking. He was barely under control. It would have been easy to kill him, had Narita Yuzuru not interfered."

Hands slid up his tartan-clad thighs, around the jut of his hip bones, and down. "But you've given me Narita, O-Ran."

"Yes, m'lord."

"Any time I want—"

"Yes... You would love him at first sight, m'lord, he's beautiful for all of that, like a half-grown wildcat... He doesn't remember us at all. Doesn't remember. Isn't that funny, m'lord?"

"But those eyes," Nobunaga said. "The same eyes, are they not?"

"Yes," said Ranmaru. "Yes—"

The rest was lost in a sigh of pleasure. Nobunaga watched him, gaze half-shuttered as if his attention were occupied by an image that was purely mental. Thinking.

"We're going out," he said.

They went out. People stared. They stared in the Ginza, they stared in Harajuku, they stared in Shibuya. They stared in Roppongi, and Nobunaga stared back, grinning. Ranmaru saw one (Australian? American?) blonde lean into another and say in English, _hey, do you think he's a rock star?_

Shiba Eiji was attractive but not _that_ attractive (in fact Nobunaga wanted something done about the nose). This was on another order altogether, though hardly out of the blue insofar as Ranmaru was concerned. Nobunaga was what he was; only the petty folk had changed. The land had rotted with peace, nigh to the core, and these days no one understood the idea of shoguns.

But they understood rock stars.

They were still staring at one in the morning in Juliana's Tokyo, when Nobunaga turned to him and said something indistinguishable over the bass pounding of the music. Ranmaru shook his head, eyes wide, half-laughing.

"I'm sorry, m'lord—"

Nobunaga shoved a couple of feather boa-flouncing girls out of the way, leapt off the platform and dragged Ranmaru off the dancefloor. Next to the fire exit he slammed Ranmaru against the wall, pinning his wrists over his head in a bruising grip. The kiss was a hot meshing of lips and tongue that left Ranmaru gasping for breath. His head spun.

_Yours for the taking—_

"I said," Nobunaga whispered, "This could be fun."


	8. You shimmer like words I barely hear

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chiaki, pre-book 2. Incomplete.
> 
> Music: [Bohren &amp; der Club of Gore, "Kleinerfinger"](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcGV3whXtTs)

Chiaki arrives by car at dusk. It takes forty-five minutes to cross the suspension bridge, but once within city limits the traffic miraculously eases. On the highway the black silhouettes of electric poles and radio towers flicker past like ghosts. Behind them the sun descends, transforming the mirror-glass facades of skyscrapers into blocks of solid flame. As the web of the city swallows him streetlights come on in his wake.

At one intersection a train flashes past overhead, thundering. In the flickering light that falls from its windows he glimpses a dense black squiggle, spraypainted large on the concrete support of the overpass. With a jolt he recognizes it as the bonji of Aizen Myouou. Or is its form accidental? He has no time to meditate. The light turns green.

Each car is a scene in a discontinuous narrative. The city is filled with signs.

***

The jazz club is located downstairs from a karaoke bar and next door to a massage parlour. The approach to the front door – such as it is, an airless opening in a brick wall – necessitates ten paces down a dank alley and a flight of corrugated metal fire-escape stairs down to the basement level. The windows are square, covered with steel grilles. The interior appears much the same as when he used to frequent the establishment two or three years ago. The barman does not recognize his body, and scowls in a menacing manner when he tries to order a drink.

"Listen, kid—" he says. Chiaki pushes his glasses up his nose and looks him in the eyes. The man falls still.

"Draft Asahi," he says. "You're a good guy, master. Card the little bastards for all they're worth."

He takes his beer to a corner table, leans against the wall and lights a cigarette. After taking the first drag he drops the match into the ashtray instead of extinguishing the flame, letting it burn to a curl of charcoal. The room is three-quarters filled, and every few minutes more people slip in through the door. Chiaki watches the stillness fall over each face as soon as they take their seats, as if the music touches them in the manner of an unwary finger, making them withdraw their softness within. Then they appear alone, even if they arrived in twos and threes. The air is blue and heady with smoke.

Onstage the drummer sets the pace, a slow, hypnotic dusting of snares – rattle, rattle, the sweeping shiver of a cymbal – over which the keyboards expound in mournful, bell-like chords. The double bassist is a woman in a black dress, her long brown hair caught to one side of her face. She leans over her instrument as she plays, attentive to the point of monomania, as if it were a child. The sound she produces is a subterranean groan underlying the melody, felt rather than heard.

The sax man stands a little left of centre stage, his weight on one leg, the other carelessly bent. He is young, with non-descript looks and an angular build that gives an impression of gauntness rather than fashion. He wears frayed jeans, an eyecatching cap of knit purple wool, a leather vest that leaves his shoulders bare. Under the stage lights the skin of his arms gleams with a fine sheen of sweat. He is smiling, a vague smile fixed on nothing in particular.

The cue is invisible, inaudible. The other instruments whisper or grind to a halt, leaving the drummer to play on – rattle, rattle, tap – the sax man straightens, lifts the mouthpiece to his lips and blows.

It is a voice; a wordless, human wail cutting through the smoke. The sound crescendos, maintains, vibrates like the beating of blood in the ears. There is something unbearable about it, a sort of rapture. Each long, ululating note pierces the listener with monotony, weighs down his limbs, fills him until no space is left – not even for memory to echo. The next moment the keyboards come in again.

A minute motion in the corner of Chiaki's eye captures his attention, and he turns. There is a woman leaning against a pillar at the back of the room. She's wearing a red halter dress. The flat pleats of the skirt fall over the top of her tense thighs. Her hair is long and tumbles down her back in dark waves. She lifts her head, and the warm light from the bar falls full on her face.

From across the room she meets his gaze.

Her eyes are large and dark. Her lips part on words he cannot hear.

She turns and disappears down a hallway he knows leads to washrooms and storage, and a locked door. He waits, but she does not reemerge.

***

That night he pays 4000 yen for the right to lie in one of a hundred and fifty-three capsules in a place called the Hotel White City.

By his reckoning each unit is four times as voluminous as a funerary coffin. The interior is slick white plastic extrusion-molded into a simulacrum of habitat: a shelved compartment for holding personal objects, another enclosing a television screen and its controls, the largest by far for the human body. The corners are rounded, inoffensive. A bamboo curtain separates his feet from the rest of the room; he is perversely glad for its lack of soundproofing. The futon and blanket and soft woven paper-covered pillow have the surreal texture of these same objects on a plane or train, as if they are not really a futon or blanket or pillow but reproductions thereof, designed to mimic form and function in the absence, mysterious, of substantiality.

"Misplaced nostalgia," he says to himself, aloud. The first time he died was in a barracks where men slept two to a tatami mat, curled up in their own cloak and sharing fleas. The fever consumed him from the inside out: wracked him with unquenchable thirst even as he drenched his bedding in sweat, tore at his bowels, liquefied his flesh. When the end came he was half-mad and covered in his own filth, too weak to even ask for the mercy of the sword.

What is glory in the face of that? What is duty? Honour? Virtue?

Concerns of the living. Baubles prized by children who do not yet realise the cruelty of the prison into which they were born. Death lasts longer; as such it carries greater weight.

When he takes his glasses off his surroundings are blurred and slightly brighter.

He has grown used to the body's quirks. Its previous owner bequeathed him only a name and the fleeting impression of a life not worth returning to – a best-case scenario. He takes care of it "as if it were his own". Over the past two years the limbs have lengthened, the frame filling out to adult strength. He bought himself new glasses, let his hair grow. When he glimpses his reflection in a washroom mirror it is "himself" he recognizes.

The body serves as the soul's purgatory. It is the sentence meted out for the crime of life, no more. It takes a connoisseur to distinguish the prisoner behind the bars: a stance, an energy, a look about the eyes.

As cells run this one passes for comfortable.


	9. Anno mirabile

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Naoe, between books 12-13.

Naoe sleeps. He dreams of waking in another city, putting on a black suit, meeting his own gaze in the mirror. At nine he leaves the apartment and at three he is getting out of his car before a tiny mossy-eaved shrine. The inside is shadowed and smells of incense. He circles around the dilapidated altar, and opens a door. At the bottom of a set of spiral stairs that should not exist Hakkai awaits, eyes narrowed in a face grey and patient like that of a sandstone Buddha. He opens another door, bows, and falls in behind Naoe as he steps through. The place they enter is dark and cool. There is a dizzying sensation of space, but it is impossible to guess at the room's proportions. Perhaps it is a cave. Holy energy seeps from the ground like mist and saturates the air. Tendrils of it catch at Naoe's trouser legs as he descends toward the centre. There a reddish glow flickers, not like a flame, but in the manner of bright light shone through animal tissue to illuminate the pulsating mesh of vessels that carry blood from the heart and back. As it is approached the source of the glow reveals itself: a misshapen lump sprouting limbs, extremities, skin as fine as cobweb, a fleshy bud enveloping a cabinet of white bone enclosing a human soul trapped like a specimen in the jelly of the developing brain, a pinned butterfly that sleeps and dreams of being a man.


	10. Way of difference

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kotarou, post book 12.

Haruie comes to Kotarou several days later, defeat in her eyes.

"He keeps asking," she says. "Why Naoe isn't... with him. He gets angry. He—"

She shakes her head, passes a hand over her face. Kotarou watches her calmly. He places his hands over the arms of his chair, deliberately in plain sight.

"Kagetora-sama's state will not endure forever," he says. "My advice at this juncture would be to make him comfortable and not contradict or upset him, at least until he is sufficiently healed in body. Given time the shock will wear off, and his mind will recover on its own. The Fuuma are at his disposition regardless of whom he believes me to be. If he wishes to have 'Naoe' by his side, then I will take up those duties accordingly."

Haruie gives a tiny, broken laugh. _Convenient for you, isn't it?_ She doesn't bother to say. There is no pretense in Kotarou to puncture.

"I'll kill you if anything happens to him," she says instead. "With my own hands. I promise you."

***

He spends the rest of the day examining his options.

It is, indeed, to his political advantage to play to Kagetora's delusions, to "make him comfortable". To this end there is physical deception: clothing, stance, personal habits, tenor of voice and choice of words, and the correct execution of Naoe's duties as retainer. These pose no great difficulty.

It is the mind of the man that concerns him. The case is a special one. From Naoe he immediately derived the sense of a personality pushed to extremes not often encountered, and mentally marked him for study. In due course he had opportunities enough to vivisect the man. Yet Naoe Nobutsuna remained stubbornly opaque, his motives impenetrable as his acts were unpredictable, elusive until his death. Kotarou could say with certainty that Uesugi Kagetora moved Naoe, for good or for ill, and only Uesugi Kagetora – but no more.

Hojo Ujiteru's voice resurrects in his memory, vivid with impatience:

_You will never understand, Kotarou!_

This is a fact. He has neither the desire nor the will to understand. In fact he doubts the "understanding" of which Ujiteru spoke is not a misnomer: how should the communication of such a pernicious, immaterial thing as emotion lead to enlightenment? How should it be communicated at all? What most men call empathy is no more than their own hopes and doubts ascribed to the behaviour of others. Thus they allow prejudice to hobble perception.

Man is not a creature commonly ruled by logic. A pragmatist would not waste time on wishing it otherwise, but instead sets himself the task of _observation._ Some men, such as Ujiteru himself, think as they feel and act as they think; others, such as his brother Ujimasa, the former head of the Hojo household, are influenced by emotion in an indirect manner, all the while acting as they believe rationality dictates. In all cases it is the existence of rules prescribing the final consequence – the individual's action – that is of practical import. A summary of the rules governing a particular individual suffices; there is no need to go further.

Kotarou has no internal experience that corresponds to the words _love, hate, fear, sorrow, pride, anger, disgust,_ and the myriad nuances therein contained. To him they are abstractions of utility: names given to levers that move men, and that cause men to move the world.

Naoe went to the grave with his secrets. His only clue now is Kagetora himself.

***

When he enters Kagetora's room the next morning Nagahide looks up and his mouth twists. He spits out an obscenity, gets up and walks out. Haruie turns pale but doesn't move.

Kagetora, too, looks up. Kotarou misses nothing: the brief widening of his eyes, the minute relief in his face before it is replaced by a different, as yet unnamable tension.

"Where have you been?" Kagetora says coldly.

Kotarou lowers his eyes as he's seen Naoe do, with a kind of false restraint, and lifts them again to his lord and master's face. Henceforth he would have much greater leisure for study.

"It does not matter, Kagetora-sama," he says. "I am here now."


	11. Man or astroman?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Naoe and Kagetora. With reference to _58 Indices sur le corps (et Extension de l'âme)_, by the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy.

i) Memory is an inculcated, latent disposition of cerebral matter, liable to be excited into a specific holding pattern of neural impulses. Upon his arrival in a newly emptied body the _kanshousha_ must seal away the parts of the brain that have already been used, or risk contamination. Yet the soul itself carries memory from body to body like a stain, or a disease. Is memory the mark of the insubstantial left on the substantial, or of the substantial on the insubstantial?

ii) Strictly speaking it is not the memory of injustices suffered that fuels souls engaged in the Dark War, but _nen_ – otherwise, human Will. The disruption caused by Will of the order toward which the system in/ex/tends is mysterious; only demiurgical intervention is sufficient to neutralize it. Perhaps it is after all necessary. Yet accepting this does not provide us with a definition of the first cause.

iii) A paradox: how do we speak of "Kagetora's soul" without our chain of reference doubling back to a historical body that is now dust? Where is the ontological divide between the one who says "mine", and the one thus owned? As well ignore that it was Naoe Nobutsuna's blood that ran from the gash on Tachibana Yoshiaki's wrist.

iv) A positive definition of karma is that it is the individuating quality of a soul, as it remains - _sine qua non_ \- even after impurities such as memory have been removed. However each action performed in the Six Worlds adds to the soul's karma. Is not the very essence of the soul susceptible to change, then? And what of the impurities? Where is the beloved in this?

v) The tragedy is that the body does not introduce the soul to temporality. We are all no more than the foam that forms on the surface of a rushing river.

vi) Without memory it is easy to lose oneself in baseless anxiety. Takaya learns eventually that the dichotomy between "himself" and "Kagetora" is false, and what he had identified as "Kagetora" is doubly false, constructed as it was from external intent deformed and misread; an image of an image. The irony lies in the fact that it is "Takaya" who is actuated by his striving toward this non-existent self. Action completes the synthesis of soul and body. What would "Kagetora" be without "Takaya"?

vii) An axiom: "Ougi Takaya" is not the name of a body but of an _incarnation_ (that is, of an action). The child in the womb was nameless.

viii) In truth the union of soul and body establishes a state of belonging of one substance to the other in such a fashion that neither assumes nor subsumes the other, but is _susceptible:_ the soul of being touched by the body, and the body by the soul. What touch communicates is not object but force. We speak of pulsion, impression, expression, compulsion. The etymological root of emotion is motion. Bodies brush and ride up against each other, come into fleeting contact, merge, part. No greater reality exists than the one in which Tachibana Yoshiaki caresses Ougi Takaya's skin with his hands and tastes his secretions with his tongue. The body is the soul's fatal weakness; it is its salvation.


	12. At most, flowers

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I, III: Takaya, book 7. II: Takaya and Yuzuru, post-_Itetsuita Tsubasa_ (flashback story in book 5.5). IV: Haruie and Naoe, pre-book 1.
> 
> Music, [David Sylvian, "Cover Me With Flowers"](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAnyZEdA8UQ)

_I can offer nothing  
This nothing's everlasting  
I could be Shiva lying  
Beneath ferocious darkness  
My heart's devoured  
Cover me with flowers_

_Let me see the face  
Of all enduring grace  
Let me take a crack at  
All that matters  
And in the weightless hours  
Cover me with flowers_

\--David Sylvian, "Cover Me With Flowers"

  


  


I.

  
He woke to the void. There was no up, no down; he could not tell if he still breathed. Around him darkness heaved and throbbed like the belly of a great beast. He was deaf and blind, with no tongue with which to give voice. He could not scream.

Desperately he _reached out—_

He floated in a horizonless space, lit as if by unseen fire. The space was made of windows, or perhaps the windows hung in space, possessed of length and width but not depth. Many opened only onto darkness; as many more showed clouds scuddering across a wavering, watery sky. Others led to people, scenes, empty rooms. Facet upon facet, reflection upon reflection.

He knew what they were.

He knew, too, who he was.

He whispered a name and reached out again, searching.

  


II.

  
Yuzuru had a datura bush in his backyard. It had leaves that were broad and heart-shaped, vegetable-like, not glossy. The flowers were white. Each oval bud was the length of his hand from wrist to fingertip, the petals all of one piece, wound around on itself like twisted silk rope. When ready it would unfurl at a leisurely pace over the course of a single day, giving off a sweet scent as dusk descended. Rain was fatal to the process.

"It's poisonous," Takaya said. "I knew a guy who ate some of the seeds once."

He was fifteen and a month. He sat with his back against the door jamb, one leg dangling off the edge of the veranda. Within the confines of Yuzuru's house he used to hold himself as if about to take flight at any moment, and that tension had not completely dissipated. He almost never spoke of acquaintances unfamiliar to Yuzuru, or of the past.

"He heard they give you good dreams. Heard it was better than meth. Fucking idiot."

"What happened to him?"

"They found him standing in the street in the middle of the night, butt naked and screaming. Never been right in the head since. It was stronger than meth all right."

Yuzuru ran a finger along the blossom from peduncle to lip. The story did not frighten or sadden him. It engendered an odd sense of wonder.

"How strange," he said. "It smells so sweet it calms the heart."

  


III.

  
Memory crowded on him. It was like standing on the roof of a glass tower, each pane a darkened room; or in an infinite hall of blank portraits. Each light illuminated only itself, as if the moment were enclosed by walls, or – in the manner of a floating stage – by watchful obscurity.

In one scene Irobe was saying, "These, then, are the four celestials: mandaraka, the white flower. Mahamandaraka, the great white flower. Manjushaka, the red flower. Mahamanjushaka, the great red flower. Too there are the sacred loti: padma, pure lotus of noon. Utpala, blue lotus of evening..."

In the memory he sat in a position of meditation, silently listening. He could not, now, recollect where the room was, but there was the sense of a wide space. The flames of candles flickered somewhere immediately outside of his range of vision, casting one long dancing shadow upon another. Fragrant smoke rose in thin blue coils from a brazier that stood between him and Irobe, blurring the air. The wall behind Irobe's head was covered in a mural of great and complex scale, extending upward and to both sides, its edges lost in shadow. It was a painted mandala representing the Diamond World. In the wavering illumination the figures of bosatsu and nyorai emerged from penumbra as living things might, blue and ochre-yellow limbs on the very verge of flowing from one mudra to another. He felt their eyes on him, glittering; endlessly patient.

In the memory he remembered white light rising through his body, white light that soaked through every pore and fibre, as water rises in the stem of a cut flower.

IV.

  
_When the Buddha had finished preaching this Sutra, he sat with his legs crossed in lotus position and entered into the samadhi of the place of immeasurable meanings, his body and mind never moving. And as soon as the Lord had entered upon his meditation, there fell a great rain of divine flowers covering the Lord and the four classes of hearers, while the whole Buddha field shook in six ways: it moved, removed, trembled, trembled from one end to the other, tossed, tossed along._

_Then did those who were assembled and sitting together in that congregation, monks, nuns, male and female lay devotees, gods, Nagas, goblins, Gandharvas, demons, Garudas, Kinnaras, great serpents, men, and beings not human, as well as governors of a region, rulers of armies and rulers of four continents, all of them with their followers, gaze on the Lord in astonishment, in amazement, in ecstasy._

  


V.

  
"Under no circumstances must these roots be employed together as tincture," said Haruie. "The formula is six parts mandarake to two parts aconite, two parts Chinese angelica, two parts Japanese angelica, and two parts senkyuu, ground into powder and boiled in water. To be strained well until no sediment remains, and the clear liquid drunk while it is still warm. After two to four hours the patient will fall into a dreamless sleep and feel no pain, even when the knife enters his body."

She refolded the cloth packets, then placed her hands in her lap. For a long time she had been reluctant or unable to speak of such knowledge as she'd acquired in her absence.

"The flower spoken of in the sutras," Naoe said. "Small wonder that it soothes pain. And what if you ingest it raw? Would it satisfy all earthly desire as well?"

"You would go mad," she said sharply, looking at him. "And then you would die. It is a poison."

  


VI.

  
Perhaps all celestial flowers are harbingers of death.


End file.
